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Watch as our team takes you through the design of a basic app in CommCare
MOBILE DATA COLLECTION
Agricultural Finance Programs
The explosion of microfinance and insurance institutions (MFIs) has provided alternative sources of capital and security for small-scale farmers. Availability to Microfinance and insurance options allow agricultural communities to reduce investment risk, as well as provide the growth capital needed to thrive.
However, while microfinance and insurance have allowed farmers to increase crop yields through new investments, the penetration rates in rural rates — where capital and risk hedging is needed most — still lag behind other geographies. Complex dataflows and poor infrastructures lead to impossible demands on finance, insurance, and credit officers. Only robust, off-grid IT solutions can help expand financial tools to the millions that require them to help expand their businesses.
Learn how CommCare can help your agricultural finance program
Benefits of Mobile Data Collection in Agricultural Finance Programs
Offline capabilities support individual loan tracking without large amounts of paperwork that get lost or destroyed in remote locations.
Complex logic reduces data entry needs to allow for quicker turn-around times in remote locations, allowing officers to visit more customers or customers in farther locations.
SMS capabilities allow farmers to receive confirmation of payment history, allowing them to build up credit for higher loan amounts in the future.
Cloud-hosting allows management to remotely view and monitor loan books in real-time, reducing their risk portfolio and allowing for increased leading to new markets.
Featured CommCare-Based Agricultural Finance Projects
Micro Insurance Academy
India
MIA uses CommCare to register members and asset values to help with premiums calculations and claims management.
myAgro
Senegal
myAgro uses CommCare to decrease enrollment times and improves efficiency and data quality for their microfinance in Senegal.
A Glimmer of Hope
Ethiopia
Glimmer's locally-based community facilitators use CommCare to monitor and track the progress of loan recipients.
Micro Insurance Academy
India
Dimagi is launching a pilot with MIA to help with premiums calculations. Household members are registered and asset values are calculated programmatically, allowing for frontline workers to focus on providing counseling videos on claims coverage. Data collected are stored on CommCareHQ to allow for swift payouts in the event of a claim. This system is designed to expand into extremely low-resource settings while shifting claims management to an off-site, remote setting to reduce overhead expenditures.
myAgro
Senegal
The current microfinance system in Senegal assumes that farmers are too poor to save. myAgro disagrees with this assumption. Instead, they are helping farms save little-by-little. Through their bank-less savings scheme, average harvests for myAgro farmers increase by 50% – 100% over traditional farms and net farming income increases $150-$300 per farmer. MyAgro uses CommCare to decrease the amount of time to enroll each farmer, increase real-time data processing for faster data-driven decision making, improve data quality, and reduce human resources and enrollment materials costs associated with staff time, pen & paper, etc.
A Glimmer of Hope
Ethiopia
A Glimmer of Hope invests in community-led, integrated solutions that transform the lives of rural Ethiopian families. To support agriculture growth, income and savings, Glimmer provides financial and business training with small loans. In 2019, Glimmer deployed CommCare to support and improve the organization’s monitoring and evaluation activities. Locally-based community facilitators use the CommCare application on mobile tablets to monitor and track the progress of loan recipients. Through the hidden-values feature, Glimmer is able to quickly identify issues with on-time loan repayments and other challenges and provide additional support to borrowers. CommCare’s off-line capabilities, case management features, and easy access to real-time data have enhanced Glimmer’s service provision and program tracking.
The Latest on Mobile Data Collection for Agriculture
Updates and advice from our world-class partners and Global Services team:
What’s Ahead for Mobile Data Collection in Agriculture?
A Q&A with Research Coordinator Jack Hetherington (ACIAR) on his advice for mobile data collection in ag programs.
How to Unlock the Power of Feedback
Oikoi (formerly AgImpact) shares their advice on how providing immediate feedback to beneficiaries can improve a variety of outcomes for the entire program.
Digitizing Coffee Agronomy Training & Monitoring
Global Technology Manager Kevin Zeigler discusses how three of Technoserve’s initiatives adopted mobile data collection platforms to train farmers in East Africa.
Learn more about CommCare
Learn how the world’s most powerful mobile data collection platform can help your program
More than 2000 projects across 80 countries rely on CommCare for their mobile data collection and reporting needs.
“We are ready to design
applications that are everything
from simple and straightforward to
those with challenging and unique
designs and use cases.”
- Ted Barlow, President
“CommCare gave us the ability to
control the experience of our fieldbased
data collectors, which
drastically reduced human error.”
- Bhawna Mangla, Senior Research Associate
“Thank you for helping us to
gather data, refine programming,
and spread the message about our
impact in fighting global climate
change and extreme poverty.”
- Sarah Baird, Executive Director